Camille Angué (ECI): "ClimaTech is meant to help investors, owners and infrastructure operators protect themselves against the dual physical and transitional risks"
Camille Angué is Co-Director of EDHEC Climate Institute, a centre that brings together the school’s climate-related research work. Within it she has just launched ClimaTech (1), whose goal is to increase our understanding of technological solutions that can be used to reduce carbon emissions and improve infrastructure resilience when faced with climate risks.
- This interview has been orginally published in the EDHEC Vox Mag n°17 "Who decides? Rethinking the Architecture of Power"
Can you give us an overview of ClimaTech?
Climate risks have a dramatic impact on living things overall, but they also have very tangible Financial consequences. Research shows that by 2050 infrastructure-related transition risks could destroy up to $600 billion in value worldwide (2). At the same time, physical risks such as storms, rising sea levels and heatwaves threaten up to 54% of the value of certain investment portfolios (3).
ClimaTech is meant to help investors, owners and infrastructure operators protect themselves against these dual physical and transitional risks. It’s a compendium of the best strategies designed to promote infrastructure decarbonisation and resilience. It addresses the issues specific to eight superclasses of infrastructure including transport, energy, water and data storage. Each strategy or technology (there are over 1,800 in total) is classified by sector and asset type and evaluated by the percentage of emissions or value destruction it avoids. It’s the first database of its kind in the world.
Who is it for?
EDHEC Climate Institute is an applied research institute. We work on initiatives that will be useful for industry and that can lead to business applications. With ClimaTech, the aim is to support investors’ decision making. This might, for example, involve financial institutions who want to improve how they assess long-term risk before they lend. It’s for infrastructure operators who want to make the right decisions to preserve their revenues from the consequences of climate change. We’re speaking to banks that want to know whether the risk exposure of their collateral or investments is valued fairly.
We’re also focusing on EDHEC’s ecosystem and business ventures, which can use the data or intellectual property we create. This is the case for Scientific Climate Ratings (an EDHEC Venture), which uses ClimaTech to build its rating system (4).
Why is this an important subject?
Many current initiatives want to facilitate infrastructure decarbonisation and resilience. This includes the Green Deal and European level taxonomy. These are important tools, but they don’t totally protect users from greenwashing or opportunistic effects. With ClimaTech, we completely remove the political dimension from the exercise. We’re agnostic on the choice of technologies; we don’t exclude any strategy or any industry upfront, whether it’s “green” or “brown.”
We focus on impact. Each of our analyses is mapped and rigorously tied to the scientific literature. Our work is also regularly audited by a review committee of high-level experts (with representatives from the World Bank, the European Investment Bank, engineering consultancies, major universities, etc.).
Our research shows, for example, that certain popular measures only have a marginal impact once they’ve been implemented (e.g., carbon capture and storage, or using hydrogen in certain sectors), whereas other solid, measurable solutions can achieve 95% efficiency, depending on the context.
What’s important is that we have at last given all of our stakeholders access to an exhaustive, scientific, coherent framework for assessing climate risk and implementing effective preventive measures. We’re now expanding ClimaTech’s work to listed companies to offer them a deep analytical Framework and genuinely operational solutions.
References
(1) Developped by EDHEC Climate Institute, ClimaTech tackles transition and physical risks through its dedicated ClimaTech database, the world’s largest repository on infrastructure decarbonisation and resilience. This resource provides evidence-based solutions for reducing emissions and adapting to climate hazards across 101 infrastructure subclasses. - https://climateinstitute.edhec.edu/climatech-project
(2) Noël Amenc et al., Highway to Hell: Climate Risks Will Cost Hundreds of Billions to Investors in Infrastructure before 2050, EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, September 2023 - https://climateinstitute.edhec.edu/publications/highway-hell-climate-risks-will-cost-hundreds-billions-investors-infrastructure-2050
(3) Noël Amenc et al., It’s Getting Physical, EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, August 2023 - https://climateinstitute.edhec.edu/publications/its-getting-physical-some-investors-infrastructure-could-lose-more-half-their
(4) Scientific Climate Ratings (an EDHEC Venture) has been initiated by EDHEC Business School. Developed within a rich ecosystem which comprises notably the EDHEC Climate Institute (ECI), this venture represents the next generation of climate finance tools - combining academic rigor, quantitative depth, and practical relevance - https://scientificratings.com/
